THIS WEBSITE IS AN INTRODUCTION to
narrative structures of a new, unsuspected kind. These structures
belong to an automatic storytelling process in the brain, unknown to
our conscious minds: they are creations of our biology, an
evolutionary adaptation promoting stability. As such, they are not
designed to appear in a text, but occasionally they do and then
their grip on the text, beyond the control of its author, declares
their power and importance to us. The text has to carry two levels
of narration which know nothing of each other, but our experience of
such a text can be profound.

Under ‘autobiography’ I give an
account of how I discovered these narrative structures, and how I
worked out appropriate methods for their study over a period of four
decades. We need to understand the whole thing before we can grasp
it in relation to any particular texts.

Under ‘the problems’ I illustrate our
chief clues to the situation, the apparent conflicts in the text,
and under ‘readers’ questions’, I explain why my work has changed so
much over forty years and why it isn’t based on the work of other
scholars. Six examples are given on this website, three of them
medieval romances – the texts most affected by the phenomenon – and
three of them representatives of other genres sometimes affected: a
folk-tale ‘The Golden Bird’, the ‘All’s Well’ story used by
Shakespeare, and a modern novel, ‘Jane Eyre’.

I
have also published four books relating to this research and give
details of these under ‘publications’.

THE PICTURES
ON THIS WEBSITE express the strangeness I find in these narratives,
but there are many strange things in nature which are entirely
practical and functional. For King Horn and the Green Knight I use
fruits of the Australian Candlestick Banksia, which look like
caricatures of human faces, and another Australian fruit portrays
‘publications’. For ‘Jane Eyre’ I have chosen the stately succulents
of the Namib Desert known as ‘halfmens’. The two-storey barn from
the Czech Republic seems a good emblem for my two-storey texts, and
the door used for ‘cached papers’ is also Czech. The ‘Wild Irishman’
thicket portraying ‘the problems’ recalls the chief nightmare of New
Zealand explorers, and the stained glass bird and spider in York
Minster have long seemed to tell me something about my own labours.
The bird and the cat come from the Bayeux Tapestry, and the horse
from Kilpeck Church in Herefordshire.